Tag Archive

Last week I presented a session on Hybrid Management with OMS at the Chicago Systems Management Users Group (CSMUG). This meeting was held at the Microsoft Offices (MTC) in Chicago. The presenters for this session were Johan Arwidmark of ConfigMgr fame, System and datacenter management experts, Tom Lilly and Rich Lilly, and me. The meeting was sponsored by 1E. The CSMUG meets several times during the year to collaboratively share knowledge with the community about new products, features and capabilities for systems and enterprise management. Meetings will also feature experts in various technology areas. These experts will be available to field questions, and explore various scenarios and product use cases with attendees. Chicago System Management Users Group (CSMUG) is dedicated … Read More

Happy Holidays friends! I’ve been rather busy with several riveting initiatives of recent, and thought I’d share one of them. In this case, some ideas on migrating clients to a ConfigMgr destination hierarchy that is configured for HTTPS which means that all client to server communication happens over HTTPS. This article will expressly cover ideas on said migration. This article will not cover the steps for configuring HTTPs communication in ConfigMgr. Refer to the links below for some guidance on HTTPS configuration for ConfigMgr. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/configmgrdogs/2015/01/21/configmgr-2012-r2-certificate-requirements-and-https-configuration/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/plan-design/network/pki-certificate-requirements I strongly recommend that you acquaint yourself with the concepts and material covered in both articles and elesewhere steps before continuing with this article. Additionally, I recommend reading the fairly detailed conceptual guidelines on … Read More

The 1606 release of System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) comes with a whole slew of new features, including a pre-release Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) Connector feature. Learn about ConfigMgr 1606 here. The OMS connector will enable you to sync data such as your collections from ConfigMgr to OMS. Once the collection information is synced to OMS you can then subject any OMS agent-managed endpoint to some action, such as patching, by virtue of its membership in a collection. When you combine this capability with existing system update and other update information that exists in OMS, the practical and other applications are rather evident. Note that because this is a pre-release feature it is meant for early pre-production testing, and … Read More

This is the third article in a series of articles in which I write about my experiences managing Windows 10 with ConfigMgr 2012 R2. In the first article, I reviewed steps for installing Windows 10 ADK and creating new boot images in ConfigMgr. In the second article, I reviewed the steps for upgrading MDT 2013 integrated with ConfigMgr 2012 R2 to MDT 2013 Update 2. In this article, I will show you how to add DaRT 10, which is available in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2015 to ConfigMgr 2012 R2. The same steps will apply to ConfigMgr current branch. There are many benefits to integrating MDT with ConfigMgr. One of many such benefits is using the Diagnostics and … Read More

This is the second article in a series of articles in which I write about my experiences managing Windows 10 with ConfigMgr 2012 R2. In the first article, I reviewed steps for installing Windows 10 ADK and creating new boot images in ConfigMgr. In this article, I’ll review the steps for upgrading MDT 2013 integrated with ConfigMgr to MDT 2013 Update 2. Note that while MDT 2013 Update 1 is required for managing Windows 10, MDT 2013 update 2 is NOT required. Also Update 2 includes no major features over update 1, but I’m interested in user experience enhancements for Windows 10 in-place upgrade task sequences. Download and Install MDT 2013 Update 2 You can get this from the … Read More

In a previous post, I lamented the many frustrations that the Windows 10 ADK was causing me and many others, but also promised to post some updates if and when I got it to work for my specific use cases. I actually got this working some time ago, but I’m only now able to blog about this. So without further fuss, in this series of articles, I’ll review the steps I’ve taken to successfully manage Windows 10 in ConfigMgr 2012 R2. These steps also apply to later ConfigMgr releases. This series will cover steps for: Switching to Windows 10 ADK (1511 version). Download here. Updating Boot Images to Win PE version 10 Upgrading MDT 2013 Zero Touch to MDT 2013 … Read More

Have you been banging your head against the poor fence, trying to determine why your WinPE v10.0.10586 boot images are crushing your will to take on Windows 10 OS deployments, trying to understand the Windows 10 ADK errors and issues, and looking for guidance on when we’ll actually get OS Deployments for Windows 10 working properly? Well you are in good company. There are known issues with the existing versions of the ADK, and in this article, I seek to explore these issues, and explore some options on how to proceed. Based on this article from Microsoft, which explains this issue in great detail, the recommendation is to stick to the RTM release of the Windows 10 ADK, in spite … Read More